Reader's Dilemma: My Friend's Fiance Still Has a Match.com Profile! What Should I Tell the Bride (If Anything)?

Oh, this is quite the pickle. Let’s help this concerned bridesmaid, shall we?

Writes Kathleen: “My friend met her fiance on Match.com last year. Once they got serious, she took down her profile and she told me he took down his. They got engaged a couple months ago and asked me to be a bridesmaid in their 2012 wedding. Now I’m the one on Match. And who comes up as one of my matches? My friend’s groom! I feel like I’ve got to let the bride know, but how exactly do you tell her that her fiance’s profile is on a dating site without ruining her life?”

Here’s what I think: In sticky situations like this, I always ask myself, “Would I want a friend to tell me?” In this case, hands-down, yes, I would. And since you’re close enough with the bride to be a bridesmaid, you’re the perfect person to tell her.

Here’s what you can’t do: Make assumptions. Sure, his still having a dating-site profile doesn’t look good, but a quick way to ruin a friendship is to accuse a pal’s guy of cheating on her when you have no real evidence.

So what do you say? Try this: “Your fiance just showed up as a match for me on Match.com.”

Leave it at that. Odds are, this is all innocent, and the bride will respond with something like, “He lost his password and can’t figure out how to take his profile down!”

No matter her response, you’ve done your duty as a friend without overstepping your bounds. It’s up to her now whether she asks you more questions (“Can you tell when he last logged in?”) or brings it up to him to get to the bottom of it. Until you know for sure that he’s going on dates, there’s nothing more you can (or should) say. Let your friend decide how (or if) to handle it.

Engagement rings are a lot of money, though, so I highly doubt he’d make that investment if he wanted to date other people. But stranger things have happened

Would you tell a friend if you saw her fiance on a dating Web site? What would you say? Do you suspect there’s something sinister going on here or would you guess it’s as innocent as I think?